[LINK] Does the NBN bring redundancy?

[Richard Chirgwin]

On 5/10/11 1:31 PM, Fernando Cassia wrote:
> On Tue, Oct 4, 2011 at 21:21, Paul Brooks<pbrooks-link at layer10.com.au>  wrote:
>> Hope this helps.
>>
>> Paul.
> Thanks Paul!
>
> This gave me a nice idea of what the NBN does and what it does not.
> However the paragraph "For long-haul fibre backbones (which is what I
> see in my mental picture when I see the word 'backbone') the NBN is
> not playing in that space" gave me doubts. Does that for city-to-city
> links the NBN won't be a competitive player with existing fibres?.
>
> When I wrote the question, I was thinking of the city-to-city WAN. In
> other words if a -for example- Sydney-Brisbane fibre already exists
> (say, from Telstra) if the NBN will rent space -dark fibre- on that or
> build a second, NBN-owned city-to-city fibre link nevertheless and in
> parallel, to bring competition to the private operator and hopefully
> prices down.
The NBN won't carry long-haul, except I suppose for its own corporate 
network traffic, which it would buy from a fibre owner.

Intercity fibre is outside the NBN's brief, with an exception I'll get 
to in a second.

Take Sydney-Melbourne: there are at least four carriers operating their 
own fibre on that route - Telstra, Optus, AAPT and Nextgen - and where 
routes are contested and have heavy traffic, prices aren't a problem. So 
it would be completely superfluous to have an NBN-operated fibre on 
those routes.

Also remember that NBN Co is a wholesale-only operator: it will not 
offer inter-city WAN services, because that's a retailer's job.

The long-haul exception is where Telstra is the only operator of a 
long-haul fibre. The NBN operator is allowed to build its own fibre in 
that case.

Richard Chirgwin
>
> I'm asking not only out of curiosity but also due to self-interest...
> the local government down here is also engaged in a NBN, but playing
> the long-haul backbone game, and they recently announced that they won
> be building redundant links in parallel with existing infrastructure,
> they will just use current fibre links whenever possible, and build
> new infrastructure where there is none, which I think is a big
> "surrender" flag to the incumbents, could be interpreted as a hand out
> to the incumbent players (even if it's a peering agreement with no
> money exchanged) and finally it also kills any hope of bringing down
> rates, not to mention continuing with the current
> single-point-of-failure network where often a whole State is connected
> by a single fibre link owned by the private incumbent.
>
> Thanks for your reply.
>
> FC
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